If you don't ask, you don't get, right?
I want to come back in a very loose way to recommendation 1.2 about expanding coverage to ministers' offices, but on a more general note. You're absolutely right that ministers' offices are making important decisions, but I think there is a general tension, and I don't think an insurmountable one. As an amateur historian, you want to have the records there, but as people have more access to certain records now, it discourages actually making those records, and then you can never find out why that decision was made.
I'm just wondering how we can be sensitive to that tension, to try to create records that the public could have access to, but still maintain what, I think, on the face of it makes sense. When I'm in a meeting, for instance, I want to make private notes. I may have things that I don't want on the record forever. They're fleeting ideas. They're things that I just want to explore later that I'm not committed to. It really wouldn't make sense to have them be part of the record.
We talk about making people's notebooks accessible. Granted, if those are the only records of a meeting, then I think there's a far better case actually to make those accessible. Granted, there really ought to be some sort of record of the meeting and decisions, but how can we proceed? I think often that tension is used as an excuse not to provide any form of access at all, and that's partly how we're getting to where we are. That argument ends up trumping, and people say, well, don't we have the right to be able to consult and have our own decision-making process, and won't you be impeding on the good decision-making of government if we don't have that?
I'm just wondering how we could proceed in a way that recognizes that people need time, that some people think on paper, and they need to be able to have that process before they come to decisions. How do we do that so that this argument can't be used as a fig leaf for those who would just want to deny access for the sake of denying access?